What is the meaning of ‘home’. What does it mean to be alive when your home is part memory and part imagination? Having emigrated to the Netherlands in 2015 in the wake of the civil war in Yemen, to Thana Faroq (1989) these are recurring questions. Through photographs, texts, and audio recordings, she researches the transformations that have helped shape her life. At the same time she uses her own experiences to also involve other migrants, refugees, and stateless people in her work. She documents their never-ending ‘journeys’; on the one hand to understand the trauma they are carrying with them, and on the other hand to give their stories a platform.
In I Was Younger Yesterday (2021), for instance, she documented the lives of six asylum seekers who were refused entry to the Netherlands. Faroq referred to the work as ‘an exercise in waiting’: waiting for another day, waiting for something that might happen. A sense of hopelessness emerges from the alternating poetic, picturesque, and realistic images. Also featuring handwritten notes, the work mainly focuses on how people can hold on to their identity when they no longer have a home.
At Prospects, Faroq is showing part of her recent book, How Shall We Greet the Sun (2023), about a young generation of female refugees in the Netherlands. Faroq: “It is my intention to create a kind of archive of memories — both my own and those of the women — of emotions and feelings that often get lost in the history of migration and uprootedness.”
Text: Esther Darley
Translation from Dutch to English: Marie Louise Schoondergang